Mythic Worlds: Three Xigmatek System Cases Reviewed. Page 2

In our today’s article we are going to discuss three system cases from Xigmatek – the company, which case products haven’t yet been featured on our site. We will talk about Xigmatek Asgard, Midgard and Utgard cases.

Xigmatek Midgard

Here is the very first computer case released by Xigmatek.

The Asgard must have been developed on the basis of this model because the Midgard has a similar practical design with a meshed front panel and a minimum of decorations. The vent grids in the side panel are perfectly standard and allow installing 80, 92 or 120mm fans opposite to the CPU or graphics card.

We’ve got a larger selection of connectors here: an eSATA port is added to the previous model’s two USB ports and two audio connectors.

The Power and Reset buttons have moved together with two LEDs to the front part of the top panel. The buttons are set wide apart from each other and are different size. You can hardly press a wrong button even blindly.

The top panel is better than the Asgard's because it is meshed. Thus, it takes part in cooling the components.

There are no fans on the top panel in the default configuration of this product but it allows installing a couple of 120 or 140mm fans there.

The back panel shows that the chassis has a bottom PSU bay. There are two sets of mounting holes so that you could install a PSU with a horizontal fan facing either down or up.

Somewhat unusual are the two pairs of openings for the pipes of a liquid cooling system. They are sealed not with rubber gags but with single-use metallic ones.

The developers of this system case are proponents of a highly dubious idea that vent holes in the right panel are good. So, there are two vent grids there: opposite to the HDD rack and opposite to the customary location of the CPU cooler's back-plate.

The bottom panel is quite interesting. The Midgard has two large-diameter feet with vibration-absorbing pads at the front and a couple of small cylindrical feet at the back. The rear feet seem to have been made so small in order to leave more room for the removable filter of the PSU's vent hole. It's good to have such protection against dust but it is only compatible with small-size PSUs. Besides, the 120mm fan seat you can see nearby does not have any filter at all.

The chassis is made from 0.6mm steel but the side panels are now 0.7 millimeters thick. The Asgard’s panels are thinner.

The chassis is long. Coupled with the transverse rack with drive bays, this gives the graphics card as many as 300 millimeters to settle in.

The screw-less fastening mechanisms for expansion cards and 5.25-inch bays are quite handy.

The PSU bay is intended for small models and shows some inconsistency on the developer's part. The PSU is fastened to the back panel through a vibration-absorbing pad, but its bottom rests on small metallic stubs without any damping.

There is no paltry economy here. The back-panel brackets are reusable. You can secure your expansion cards with screws or using the screw-less fastening mechanism.

Screw-less locks are often set on only one side of a 5.25-inch bay, a spring-loaded tab in the bay itself holding the device on the other side. Here, the locks can be found on both sides of the drive bays.

Hard disk drives are installed into the bays on guides to which they are fastened via vibration-absorbing pads. The guides are only held in the bays by the force of friction, but this shouldn’t be a problem unless you are going to transport the chassis with installed HDDs somewhere.

An adapter guide is included into the box for installing external 3.5-inch devices into a 5.25-inch bay.

There are actually quite a lot of various accessories included with this system case. These are rubber trims for the openings designed for the pipes of a liquid cooling system and cable holders that are to be inserted into the threaded holes near the mainboard. The holders are not large and stiff enough, in our opinion, to perform their function well.

There is also a simple fan speed controller among the accessories. It can manage from one to three fans with 3-pin connectors. This controller is designed as a back-panel bracket, which is rather inconvenient as you need to access the back panel to turn its knob around. Anyway, some people may find this accessory useful.

Talking about fans, you have to remove the front panel if you want to access the system fan located in front of the HDD bays. Although the fan is inside the chassis, it is fastened from the side of the front panel.

The Midgard offers a hidden compartment to hide cables in. The compartment is narrow, making it hard to hide sleeved cables, but we’ve seen even worse implementations of this feature.

We had no serious problems assembling our configuration in this system case but the HDD cables are rather a mess as you can see in the photo. The assembled Midgard would look prettier if the HDD guides were designed in such a way that the HDDs' connectors faced the right panel of the case.